Unofficial PBE Patch Notes for 11/8/2013

"Maokai was once a peaceful nature spirit dwelling in an idyllic forest,but the arrogance of humans brought an end to that life.Now he is a gnarled shadow of his former self,twisted by dark magics that defied the natural order of life and death. Infused with power he never asked for, the mighty treant has become a vengeful force of nature,sundering his enemies with wild magic and iron-hard limbs as he searches Valoran for the means to restore the Shadow Isles to its former glory.

Before the Shadow Isles became a land of death, the islands teemed with natural life and beauty. This was never truer than in the isles' sacred forest: a paradise of thriving trees and countless species,both animal and spirit alike. When the king of the Shadow Isles ordered his sorcerers to crack open the barrier separating life and death, the forest served as a well of power the magi drank deeply from.

The sorcerers' ritual succeeded in corrupting the cycle of life and unleashing forces they could not hope to contain. Vitality seeped from every living thing in the Shadow Isles: great trees withered into gnarled husks,people warped into twisted shades, and forest spirits became hollow wisps. Maokai, the strongest spirit of the sacred forest,watched in horror as his world crumbled and died around him. He fought to mend the wound in the world,but could not halt the destruction wrought by the human folly. As the ghastly energies sought to overwhelm the great spirit, he made one last desperate attempt to preserve the life of the land.Maokai inhabited the ancient oak at the heart of the forest's spiritual power. There he gathered the essence of the isles into the tree as the corruption of undeath clawed hungrily at anything within reach.Fortified by boundless magic,Maokai could not be consumed entirely,though the spirit was not left unscathed.

Maokai,now saturated with the essences of life and death,became fused with the ancient oak and contorted into an abomination. For ages, pain and grief were the only companions the spirit had. His boughs grew heavy as he wept at the desolation of everything he had known and loved,and his roots tore from the earth as he raged at the reckless sorcerers that had ruined his home.But all was not lost. Maokai had preserved the last vital spark remaining in the Shadow Isles, and with it,the hope of returning life to the land.

Like moths to a flame, the tormented shades of the Shadow Isles were drawn to the living essence within Maokai. The spirit guarded the seed of life from the relentless undead, but Maokai knew he could not fend them off forever. He needed to escape the land of death his home had become,so he cast himself into the sea and trusted in nature to guide him towards a living land. There he hoped to find the means to cast out the forces of undeath and restore life to the Shadow Isles.

One for All Mode Now on the PBE!

Featured Gameplay Modes are about ready to burst onto the League! We have a variety of experimental modes - each with a unique spin on the classic League of Legends formula – that we’re looking to introduce one at a time. We’re limiting the availability of each mode so that you can try out a variety of different game types. After they’re brought down, we’ll check out your feedback as we develop new game modes - there’s always a chance that we’ll bring back the ones you love the most, too.

The first mode we’re introducing is One For All, which consists of two teams of five players all using the same champion. The One For All matchmaking queue will be featured on Summoner’s Rift, but you’ll be able to try the mode out on any League map via custom games. If you’ve ever dreamed of nuking an enemy team with five Final Sparks, chaining together a series of Unstoppable Forces or living forever with back-to-back Chronoshifts, now’s your chance.

Behind the Scenes on Featured Gameplay Modes

It's been roughly a month now since we first talked about One For All, our first featured game mode, and in that time our team has been hard at work getting the last few issues resolved. Starting this weekend we'll be testing the game mode on PBE. Given that, I wanted to take some time and give a bit of insight into some of the challenges we've run into getting the feature off the ground. As we promised in the initial discussion, we really want to strive for an open dialog about each of these game modes, and discussions like this will be the first of many steps along that vein.

One For All, at the outset, seemed like a pretty straightforward game mode to develop, but we ran into some unique challenges along the way. As some of you might have seen when One For All was temporarily "available" a few weeks ago, when multiple copies of the same champion are on the same team, their abilities tend to clash in unique ways (like only two Heimerdinger turrets per team, regardless of the number of Heimerdingers on the team). This was due to the way these abilities were coded, so our first road bump was to tidy them up - no big deal. The real challenges we faced came from more nuanced interactions.

A fundamental design principle that we value highly is that of "Intuitiveness" - effectively, when you look at a skill or ability can you easily extract what it will do when used. Big ice bolt that explodes? Probably does some damage and slows. Spell called "Transfusion" that pulls blood from the target? Probably a damaging and healing spell. Making champion abilities intuitive, even when multiple copies get stacked on top of each other, was an important project we wanted to tackle. An example here would be Akali's Twilight Shroud: should it stealth every Akali who enters it? Sure! What about giving them the magic resistance and armor bonus per additional shroud? Maybe not.

Here we decided to break apart each skill to identify their core fantasies. Like Akali's shroud, where the stealth was important while the defensive stats were secondary, we went through every ability in the game to create a roughly balanced experience. In two cases with Teemo and Karthus, however, we ultimately couldn't find a balanceable solution for them in blind pick and had to take more drastic measures. For this particular release, we opted to actually remove them from being selectable champions in the matchmaking queue, although they will be selectable in custom games for those who want to try. Fighting five Teemos was like reenacting World War 1 with landmines everywhere, and fighting five Karthuses (Karthi?) was just getting aced every 160 seconds. So... don't say we didn't warn you!

Another open question was determining how people would select their champion. In a matchmaking queue we needed a solution to help a group of random people come to a seemingly fair resolution. We knew we wanted a banning phase and, since the captain would be responsible there, we first started with having the captain choose the champion for their team. After a few playtests though we saw the captain just choose whatever champion they wanted, regardless of their team's input.

We next explored solutions with voting, hoping it would help drive toward team consensus. This didn't work out much better. In boardgaming there's a style of play called "Kingmaking," where a player stops playing to win and instead works to tip the scales in favor of another player - we saw the same approach adopted here as well. Frequently we'd see four players disagree and each vote for a unique champion, leaving the fifth player with a choice. Either they could vote for their own champion and maybe get it via random choice in a tie-breaker, or they could vote for one of the other champions that, while not their first choice, was still acceptable. The value of voting last quickly caught on, and soon everyone was waiting to last second, hoping to get that kingmaking opportunity. Ultimately the final solution we came to ended up being fairly simple, even though it took a while to reach: a champion would only be selected if it ended with a strict majority of votes instead of simply being "the most."

The final question we faced has more to do with game modes in general than One For All in specific: availability. After a lot of discussion, we came to the realization that if we wanted to deliver fun, unique game modes with a lot of ongoing player engagement, launching them as permanent fixtures whenever we felt confident enough to ship wasn't the best approach. Having a game mode permanently available has a number of costs, the first of which is increased stability and support costs across the entire game. While adding a single game mode has a known impact, the multiplicative effect of multiple game modes living side by side means we'd soon be bogged down by simply maintaining these game modes, unable to work on the next unique thing.

A second consideration is that having a game mode permanently available actually is a big restriction to the type of experiences we can create. If we want the mode to have a healthy player base a year or two years from now, each game mode needs to be designed to remain engaging after thousands of hours of play. Due to the difficulty of that task it means every game mode would take an exceptionally long time to develop, and we wanted to give you guys stuff much faster than that. By intentionally going into this with the expectation that a game mode is temporary, it freed us up drastically, and it really allows us be much more experimental with the game modes we try.

After we cycle out a game mode, we'll go back to the workshop to tinker with it based on player feedback and, in the meantime, we'll deploy a few other game modes we've thought up over the past while. This lets us rotate any number of game modes in and out as we refine them, and it gives us the freedom to even take community votes for a "player's choice" month!

For the release of One For All, the matchmaking queue will be for Summoner's Rift, but you'll be able to play the mode via custom games on any map. Please let us know what you think of this mode and what changes you'd like to see to it when or if it comes back. Have fun with the mode when it is released, and I look forward to talking with you again about the response and what is coming in December!

It's... definitely a thing. I don't know if it's a good thing or not yet. <.<

If it gets too bad we can pull him too, but I wanted to see how it worked out on PBE with him selectable.^^^It doesn't work like that right now, but I could imagine you could construct that in a custom game if everyone was bought in.

what about the issues with champions like zed and orianna? have those bugs been fixed or are they just disabled?

They're fixed! You can now play soccer with Oriana all day if you like.

When you say the mode is available to use in customs does that include modes that you cycle out? Or does the cycled out mode get removed from customs too and then replaced by your new content?

When a mode is cycled out it gets removed from both the matchmaking queue and from custom games. We're definitely always oipen to bringing the mode back, but if we left it on in custom games we'd still have to pay that support cost which would slow us down a lot.

Don't know if you are taking ideas for other game modes, but here's one: every time you die you respawn with a different random champion but keep the same build.

I'm super interested in this mode myself. I think it'd be a lot of fun. Just gotta figure out how champion ownership figures in...

Will aura items be disabled in this mode? If a team coordinated together to stack that...they'd be hella scary.

EDIT: Oh, and for extra modes, have you thought about "dodgeball?" I.e. make a very small map with champs who have skillshots trying to kill eachother only with their skillshots. Deactivate autoattacks and have "rounds" where players need to wait until their team dies or wins to respawn.

We've modified most character auras so you only get two stacks, the one you apply to yourself and the one an ally applies to you. That seemed like a good balance of power vs effect. And yeah, Dodgeball constructed in the right way on HA I think would be great!

It says in the picture summoner's rift for One for All. Why isn't it on the aram map? I feel summoner's rift is too big for One or all.

You'd be surprised actually, the game works really well on SR. It's also really funny to see people figure out how the hell they're supposed to be an effective jungler with Annie or Ashe. You'll of course still be able to play on HA via the custom game flow if you want.

What seemed cool about this mode (when it was "unofficial" was the things like 5 blitz vs 5 blitz, or 5 Zed vs 5 Zed. From this comment you made, I'd assume it's gonna be 5 X vs 5 Y and not 5 X vs 5 X?

You seem to create a problem on your own. If there's 5 Karthus on 1 team, well the answer, as we all know it, is always Karthus.

For this time around we made the call to do 5x vs 5Y, because we figured people could still do 5X vs 5X in custom games if they wanted to.

Also, why do you try to defend the players so much? It's not like it's going to be competitive or anything, So when you talk about the "support" costs, it really just is you basically saying "if we eventually have to balance the game according to this game type (game mode specific balance changes) which tbh, doesn't really matter.

You see, some people take ARAM more seriously than others just for the fact that it's a different game type on its own. It's really not the same as SR or TT for example.(which also have a competitive community).

This All for One game type is anything but competitive, it's pure and simple fun. Why can't you just leave it be?

BTW, I'm not trying to be mean or anything, I love the fact that it's finally taking shape. Just my two cents.

Nah, you misunderstood what I meant by support costs. What I mean is that with each additional game mode it greatly increases the QA cost and dev time for any change. Especially as our game modes get crazier and crazier the overhead of testing to make sure that a specific skill change or scripting alteration doesn't break a character in every game mode gets higher. Balance is an important concern, but it's actually secondary to the overhead of just making sure things still work.

So for One For All what happens if one of your teammates does not own a specific champion? Is it still possible to select that champion? Or is your team limited to only champions that all 5 players share?

As long as one player on your team owns the champion everyone will be able to play as it.

Alright, I did some calculations and some play testing and can safely tell you that Sivir's Q has been nerfed to the ground. It's dead. Skarner E levels of dead.

Just to give you some comparison in numbers:Sivir's Q base damage went down to 51.33/86.16/122.15/159.3/197.61 from 60/105/150/195/240
In addition the ad ratio went down to 70%/80%/90%/100%/110% bonus ad from 110% bonus ad.

Mind, that I translated the total ad ratio into bonus ad to make the numbers more visual. That means, that after level 9 Sivir's "new" Q will deal slightly more damage, than I noted above.

In fact, it deals 228.3 base damage at level 18, which is still less than the old Q.
If you are interested in Q's dueling stats: Q deals exactly the same base damage at level 18 as before, however the ratio is slightly higher by 11% bonus ad (which is nothing).

So what you're telling me is that a champion with a balooningly high winrate got a set of changes to her harassment skill that make it weaker in the early game and stronger in late game, nerfing it in the phase when she snowballs hard, while ignoring the fact that falloff is now only 10%.

The buff to multiple targets is true, but it's not a buff. If the conversion to Total AD doesn't even make up the change in base damage at level 18 then it's a nerf at all points. But the fact that the nerf is so prominent at level 9 means that it's a BIG nerf.

Doom's numbers were right. End game is probably okay if you can hit multiple targets. Other than that you are worse flat out, and mid game hugely worse.

The buff to multiple targets is true, but it's not a buff. If the conversion to Total AD doesn't even make up the change in base damage at level 18 then it's a nerf at all points. But the fact that the nerf is so prominent at level 9 means that it's a BIG nerf.

Doom's numbers were right. End game is probably okay if you can hit multiple targets. Other than that you are worse flat out, and mid game hugely worse.

its possible to do more sinlge target damage on double strikes as your AD ratio moves from 1.98 to 2.09

The buff to multiple targets is true, but it's not a buff. If the conversion to Total AD doesn't even make up the change in base damage at level 18 then it's a nerf at all points. But the fact that the nerf is so prominent at level 9 means that it's a BIG nerf.

Doom's numbers were right. End game is probably okay if you can hit multiple targets. Other than that you are worse flat out, and mid game hugely worse.

How can I upvote this guy? He's got it.

If you have 400 ad late game (Sivir's base ad is 103 at level 18; lolwiki seems to be inaccurate here), then that's 297*11% = 32.67 additional damage on the first two hits of Q.
That's a joke if you consider how badly nerfed Sivir's early game will be with these changes.

I hate this rework. Riot took away her great sustained damage and now they'll take away her great burst. All that so she can keep her broken ass new ulitimate. She went from carry to support with this rework.

Why would you pick her after these nerfs? She changes the way bottom lane is played and apparently Riot doesn't want that. She forces aggression, because if Sivir is not aggressive, she falls behind and gets outpoked by every single ad carry. Yes, unless Barrier gets removed and sustain from Doran's + Life Steal Quints nerfed, this will always stay this way.

She still has decent sustained AoE damage, but why not simply pick Twitch or MF, who have higher burst and higher range on that?
That said, I can see her working as a support. Since she no longer scales with items at all, you can get her in the support slot and abuse that broken ultimate all day.

Okay, well if you want to run a double bloodthirster build then I suppose in theory you could hit harder on a double hit (nearly 250 BONUS AD by my calculations to make up the difference of base damage on a double hit). It's so late game though it's not practical. The far worse mid game is going to prevent you getting to that point as well.

Anyway, I don't think she'll be useless, I think people will start leveling W first and perhaps go some really different builds like BC + LW or maybe something using Shiv. She'll be a push monster still but terrible at dueling.

Doom don't you think your being just a bit over dramatic? So the highest win rate carry gets a nerf on her burst/poke? suddenly she support? She still has her passive to get in the faces of people like caitlyn, she still has her spell sheild to eat a spell durring trades, her DPS is middle of the road in terms of carries not the horribleness you describe unlike old sivir her steroid can be used frequently rather than being tied to her ultimate. Her Q got nerfs early game plain and simple we didn't complain this much when buckshot got hit...4 times.

She still trades hard and has the mobility to force said trades upon others, so she still has her early game identity, late game she AOEs pretty well and bring that broke as hell ultimate, she can split push hard and get away with it too.

The adjustments to multi hit damage loss also changes her best case/worse case probabilities, much the same way they QoL changed flame spitter then ripped about 100 damage off of it, people actually liked that change.

An adjustment to the minimum damage is needed tho i do beleive that would make this all fair and square, if they bump it up to 50-60% I will be quite content. you seem so hopeful in your other sivir related posts why the sudden sky is falling turnabout?

Sivir is no longer the Sivir I used to love as my favorite champion. I loved her for being the small range high damage champion she was.
They took away the high damage, that has never been a problem and gave her an ultimate, that doesn't feel like you are accomplishing anything yourself.

You pop ulti and the enemy carries can't run from your bruisers. That's not interesting game play for me. That's just dumb and now Riot is gutting Sivir in all other areas to compensate for that.
Riot's identity philosphy my butt. If Sivir's new identity is from now on "I press R and my team rapes everyone", then she might as well be another champion.

I kinda feel like bysteh-mychampiongotreworkednowidontlikeheranymore-khilcar right now.

Um, why the heck would they buff Nunu??? Isn't he just about the most broken Jungler already? Giving him a shorter cooldown but not changing the damage is pretty redonkulous. The heal change was scaled to CD, but damage wasn't.